Sherry Orel, Founder, and CEO of Next Level Catapult

Successful Entrepreneurs know the first step in anyone's entrepreneurial journey starts with a great business idea. However, some successful entrepreneurs learn to run their businesses from their employment days, when they are not yet their own bosses. During those employment days, they find a glimpse of entrepreneurship, and they love it. Then comes the realization that they can run their own business and be their own boss.

More Open Doors In Business

Entrepreneurship takes many forms, but entrepreneurs share a major trait in common: an entrepreneur is someone who identifies an opportunity and chooses to act on that opportunity. Most business ventures are innovative variations of an existing idea that has spread across communities, regions, and countries. Being aware of your surroundings and the encounters in your life can reveal multiple opportunities for entrepreneurship. In our daily lives, we constantly find areas where improvements could be made.

These ideas resulted from having an entrepreneurial mindset, an awareness and focus on identifying an opportunity through solving a problem, and a willingness to move forward to advance that idea. The entrepreneurial mindset is the lens through which the entrepreneur views the world, where everything is considered in light of the business. The business is always a consideration when the entrepreneur makes a decision. In most cases, the action that the entrepreneur takes is for the benefit of the business, but sometimes, it helps the entrepreneur get ready to adopt the appropriate mindset. The mindset becomes a way of life for the entrepreneur.

Giving Value To Your Employees

One of the things entrepreneurs have a hard time with is retaining people that work for them. There are many reasons for this, but one of the ways you can retain your employees is to give or add value to them. As much as you add value to your clients and customers, you actually need to add more value to your employees. The secret to happy customers and clients is happy employees. When the people you work with are happy and are experiencing good culture in the company they will make a bigger impact on your business and your clients. This is how you retain your employees in your business by being selfless and looking out for the welfare of the people you work with.

To give an example of the opposite, companies that give commission to their salespeople and include a cap to make their share smaller create negativity among their workers. It becomes obvious that this is the culture of a selfish company. In most cases, people tend to move to other companies to work and to receive the value they deserve. The best way to do this is to keep that great salesperson because they make the company move better.

Build A Career Through The Ability to Say ‘Yes’

Life is constantly presenting us with opportunities to grow, learn, do, and be more than we currently are– often long before we're ready. Saying no may protect you from failure, but it's actually the most efficient way to prevent success.

On the other hand, saying YES to every opportunity that presents itself sounds like a surefire way to keep the door open to opportunities so we never miss the next big experience. But saying YES to every opportunity would cause our schedule chaos and we’d soon be triple booked. So how do we deal with the conflict of when to say YES? Doing so for the right reasons can change our life.

1. Analyze who you are today: The first step is to understand what you want out of life and what you want to change.

2. Understand your core values: Core values are guiding principles that influence our behavior. They’re the line in the sand that allows us to make difficult decisions.

3. Create a picture that represents your vision: How do you want to see yourself in 10-15 years? This will allow you to narrow down the yeses you will take. Saying YES is important, but knowing what to say YES to is key to personal happiness and success.

‘How Hard Could It Be’ Mindset

Complaining about the things or opportunities you missed out on is just wasting time. The great clock in the sky is ticking and we need to get after it. As humans, we are more capable of rationalizing why we shouldn’t do something than we are at embracing the notion of doing something new. This is true in our daily work lives as well as our personal lives. To break that mold, we need to recognize the self-limiters in our inner voice. One of the voices might say instead, ‘How hard could it be?’ Seriously, how hard could it be?

Your mindset will determine if you will make it or not in the business world. You will never know your limits and your potential if you don’t push yourself enough to discover new things and new opportunities in life. Know that you can figure things out and embrace the unexpected journey ahead.

Become A Salesperson

Ask any businessman which is more important, their product or how it's sold, and you're likely to get a long explanation on why the product takes the cake any day of the week. They are not wrong. You don't have a business if there was nothing to sell. But, as we enter an era of hyper-competition, how we sell has become just as important, if not more important, than the product itself.

Conclusion

The primary purpose of entrepreneurship is to sell your idea, and the only way to get it sold is if you become or learn to be a salesperson. In our everyday life, we influence the situations around us, because every day we negotiate. Even deciding where to go to dinner, how to spend an evening, anything can be an opportunity to sharpen your skills selling something to other people.

Written by Dhan Ababa